Paternal Involvement in Young People's Higher Education Choices Author(S): Rachel Brooks Source: British Educational Research Journal, Vol
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
BERA 'My Mum Would Be as Pleased as Punch If I Actually Went, but My Dad Seems a Bit More Particular about It': Paternal Involvement in Young People's Higher Education Choices Author(s): Rachel Brooks Source: British Educational Research Journal, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Aug., 2004), pp. 495-514 Published by: Wiley on behalf of BERA Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1502173 Accessed: 05-06-2017 00:36 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms BERA, Wiley are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to British Educational Research Journal This content downloaded from 164.67.113.80 on Mon, 05 Jun 2017 00:36:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Carfax Publishing British Educational Research Journal Taylor & Francis Group Vol. 30, No. 4, August 2004 'My mum would be as pleased as punch if I actually went, but my dad seems a bit more particular about it': paternal involvement in young people's higher education choices Rachel Brooks* University of Surrey, UK (Received 22 April 2003; conditionally accepted 8 July 2003; accepted 5 August 2003) Research on parental involvement in educational 'choice', as well as in educational processes more generally, has highlighted clear disparities between the close and active involvement of mothers and the more distant role of fathers. While this article does not question the broad patterns identified by such studies, it does suggest that, in some circumstances at least, fathers are both able and willing to become closely involved in decision-making processes and to take on much of the 'hard work' of educational choice. Drawing on a longitudinal study of young people's higher education decision- making processes, the article presents evidence of detailed paternal involvement. It then suggests that this apparent 'anomaly' can be explained by the mothers' and fathers' differential access to cultural and social capital; a lack of previous experience of active engagement with educational markets; and, in a few cases, young people's active resistance to the involvement of their mothers. Introduction Large-scale surveys have shown consistently that parents are the most commonly consulted group of people when young people are considering their higher education (HE) choices (Roberts & Allen, 1997; Guardian & UCAS, 1999; Institute for Employment Studies, 1999; Archer et al., 2003). Typically, over 90% of respondents in these studies claimed that they had discussed their choices with their parents. However, qualitative work in this area has suggested that these statistics mask considerable differences in the role of mothers and fathers-in terms of both the level *Department of Political, International and Policy Studies, University of Surrey, Guildford GU2 7XH. Email: [email protected] ISSN 0141-1926 (print)/ISSN 1469-3518 (online)/04/040495-20 @ 2004 British Educational Research Association DOI: 10.1080/0141192042000237202 This content downloaded from 164.67.113.80 on Mon, 05 Jun 2017 00:36:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 496 R. Brooks and type of involvement in their children's decisions. Indeed, drawing on a large number of interviews with parents of children who were making their choices about university and college, Ball (2003) claims that: almost all of the middle-class mothers ... were involved in visiting universities with their children. They also telephoned higher education institutions on behalf of their children and collected brochures and various kinds of 'hot' knowledge. Mothers and daughters, less so mothers and sons, represented choosing as a joint exercise. (p. 105) He goes on to argue that these mothers played an important role in attempts to maintain middle-class familial advantage: 'The gendered nature of reproduction is ... absolutely clear, the invisible work of mothers as "status maintainers" is crucial to the development and knitting together and activation of different forms of capital' (p. 107). Discussing findings from the same study, David et al. (2003) provide further evidence of the significant contrast in parental roles. They suggest that there were, in most cases, clear differences between the close, intense and detailed involvement of the mothers and the more distant role of the fathers. Although gender was largely absent from analyses of parental involvement in education until the 1980s (and still remains a relatively under-researched area), these findings are largely consonant with research on parental involvement in other types of educational choice. Studies by David et al. (1994) and Reay and Ball (1998) both reveal how, across a sample of both middle-and working-class families, the process of secondary school choice was perceived as mainly mothers' work, with mothers being the parent responsible for collecting information, talking to children and organizing and making visits to prospective schools. However, they emphasize that 'women taking charge is not to be conflated with women being in charge' (Reay & Ball, 1998, p. 443); the mothers were, in their terms, 'the labourers of school choice'. Similar divisions of labour between parents have been found in research outside the UK (Brantlinger et al., 1996) and in choice of further education institution, primary school and even pre-school care (Brannen & Moss, 1991; Ball et al., 2000; Vincent & Ball, 2001). Indeed, Vincent and Ball conclude that the heavy investment of the mothers in their study in the process of choosing pre-school childcare, even when both partners were working, suggests that 'the discursive construction of motherhood as placing the primary responsibility for the child with the woman still holds good'; fathers remained 'bit players in a drama whose key actors are the mothers, the female carers and the children' (p. 642). Moreover, there is strong evidence that even when both mother and father are involved in decision-making, they are likely to assume different roles, with mothers typically involved with 'searching and refining' and fathers more concerned with 'confirming choices' (Reay, 1998a; Foskett & Hemsley-Brown, 2001). Mothers are also strongly implicated in how their children experience their education (Lareau, 1989; Mann, 1998; Vincent, 2000). For example, Walkerdine et al. (2001) argue that the degree of congruence between the 'mothering practices' of different social classes and the dominant culture of schools has a strong bearing on the likelihood of educational success. They suggest that 'it is women's domestic labour that produces what counts as natural and normal development and that women have This content downloaded from 164.67.113.80 on Mon, 05 Jun 2017 00:36:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Paternal involvement in young people's higher education choices 497 been regulated very strongly as mothers, having the responsibility to produce normality, correct development and educational success' (p. 114). Reay (1998b) has also demonstrated the highly gendered nature of parental involvement in schooling and shown how it is mothers, rather than fathers, who take on responsibility for monitoring their children's progress, attempting to repair any perceived educational deficits and initiating contact with teachers. In line with Walkerdine et al.'s argument, she maintains that 'it is mothers who are making cultural capital work for their children ... it is mothering work which bridges the gap between family social class and children's performance in the classroom' (p. 162). Indeed, this evidence would seem to support Vincent's (2000) emphasis on the mediating role of the mother, standing at the junction between the private world of the family and the public world outside (p. 27). Despite this evidence of maternal involvement and influence, in this article I will draw on an in-depth, longitudinal study of young people's higher education choices to suggest that, in some circumstances at least, it appears that fathers are both able and willing to take on the role of 'labourer of educational choice'. After providing some detail about the methods of the study and the characteristics of the sample, I will outline the various ways in which the young people's fathers were closely involved in their decisions about university and how, in several cases, this contrasted with the more distant role and ambivalent attitude of their mothers. I will then go on to suggest several possible reasons for this unusual degree of paternal involvement, some of which relate to the specific social and economic location of the young people who participated in the research. The research project The research upon which this article is based was conducted at a sixth-form college in the south of England ('Emily Davies College") and focused on the HE choices of 15 young people and their friends (Brooks, 2002). The young people in the sample were tracked from their entry to the college (in September 1999), through the two years of their A level or General National Vocational Qualification (GNVQ) studies, to the receipt of their examination results (in the summer of 2001). Over this period, each young person was interviewed on six occasions. The first interview was conducted during their first term at college and the sixth one was held after the A level results had been published. All the interviews were semi-structured and fairly wide ranging, covering the young people's educational experiences, plans for the future, friendships and lives outside college. In addition, they focused on the role of their parents in their decisions about what to do on leaving college.